clean and pure are 100% or they are dirty and impure

The 'One Drop Rule' --- the American laws that if you had ever had any non-white fore bearers in your distant past, one drop of black* blood in you, then you were not 100% pure white and hence had to be completely black instead, are now seen by most as a great moral evil.

They were also very good examples of the dangers of relying upon logical thinking that avoids checking in on the real world.

Those laws were all based upon following up the consequences leading from their primary assumption, the seemingly unambiguous definition of the word "pure".

(*In Whites Only Australia and in Latin America, interestingly, the tendency was if the person had one drop of white blood then they were white --- equally real world absurd but in the other direction.)

The problem was that definitions like clean and pure are those Platonic words of absolute absolute - things can only be 100% pure or 100% clean or they are no longer pure or clean, by definition*.

(*Pure : not mixed with any other substance.)

And because avoiding having a few stray atoms of other matter cling to even the purest of scientific samples is impossible, nothing in the real world is really pure or really clean.

At best, it can only be relatively clean and relatively pure --- or equally convincingly, it can only be described as relatively dirty and relatively impure.

All matter, including us humans, is therefore really arranged on a long continuum made up of varying shades of grey --- not 100% clean white and 100% dirty black.

Unmodified words like clean and pure therefore are best understood as the external manifestations of an internal mental affliction.

They are also examples of a long history of thinkers seeking to impose unreal Platonic and universal definitions upon our shared real world, all in order to salve an internal and personal mental condition suffered by only themselves and their fellow afflicted.

Prozac relief by dictionary, as it were.

Thinkers who tend to see the world in broadly Platonic ways all suffer from a common mental condition shared by many others, that of having a marked intolerance for ambiguity.

We recognize this affliction also among people who are politically conservative, or rigid in personality, or among a common subset of scientists, philosophers and mathematical-oriented types.

And to these poor people, the fact that words like clean and pure have no real world equivalent is beyond cognitive acceptance.

And to some of these afflicted folk in our recent past, the mere fact that anyone competent in both logic and with a knowledge of history could demonstrate that if we humans all came 'out of Africa', then we must all have at least 'one drop of Negro blood' in our distant past, was totally without consequence.

They badly need mental relief and this law used to provide it --- for everyone was now back to being either fully black or fully white, neatly reflecting the way these afflicted folk viewed the entire world.

These 'one drop' laws has been abandoned (in theory) but interestingly the FBI (as you might have guessed !) still does not recognize mixed race as a self definition - one is either white, black or yellow etc.

The FBI is now in the 21st century and recognizes and accepts many things that it didn't in the past --- but along with its fellow afflicted sufferers in conservative parties and in branches of academia, accepting ambiguity is not one of them....

Manhattan Indie PEN : penicillin misfits, unfits & rebels fermenting a revolution and renewing hope to a world tired, huddled and wretched

Today, words and phrases like "all-natural", "green" , "locally grown" and "no added chemicals" are such advertising cliches that it hard to believe there was a time , up to the end of WWII, when such phrases were totally anathema.

Back in that era , advertising cliches were more likely to invoke being chemically pure and to see being 100% synthetic , plastic and man-made as virtues to seek out.

But after Hiroshima , Auschwitz , Napalm and other WWII 'man-made wonders', these concepts very gradually fell out of vogue.


But at the beginning of WWII , they dominated thought in areas ordinarily seen as lying well beyond and above the thought behind popular magazine ads.

Areas such as the science of penicillin.

At a time - before as well as during the war - when only penicillin could save lives from some diseases , it seems incredible that medical researchers' aesthetic tastes could forestall the use of 'safe enough' indie PEN (crude penicillin juice) but it did - for 15 long, life-wasting years.

Before they'd be seen in public giving penicillin to the dying with no other alternative, most doctors wanted penicillin to be as pure as any chemical synthetic, as colorless and tasteless, and about as stable as any loaf of stabilizer-laced white bread could ever hope to be.

They'd rather inject almost any new manmade chemical into a human bloodstream before they would inject the life-saving juice from some bog-ordinary basement slime.

No slime from the basement of life on earth could possibly be better at saving lives than the PhD educated minds from the best Anglo Saxon universities in the land.

It was all a bit like letting your daughter date a Jew or a Negro.

Not done.

Today of course it is all totally different.

If people still don't want their daughters dating Jews or blacks, they have become smart enough not to say so in public.

And student numbers in chemistry degree programs have never been lower while biotechnology (with fermentation usually at the heart of its successes) is where all the graduates and jobs are at.

Manhattan Indie PEN

Manhattan Indie PEN - once only home to misfits, unfits and rebels has brewed up an intellectual storm so successfully that they have become the norm - with yesterday's rebels as today's bosses.....

Pure Sulfa or Salvarsan drugs were far more toxic than impure crude penicillin : so what was the fuss REALLY about then ?

Before 1945, an entire generation of doctors world wide (except for perhaps a half dozen of them) were more willing to put pure but toxic sulfa or salvarsan drugs into their patients than put impure but non toxic penicillin into them.

I will go further:  an entire generation of doctors were willing to seen letting their patients DIE, rather than be seen by other doctors as putting an impure substance into those dying patients.

an obsession with Purity - before even the patients' life 

In The Age of Modernity, before 1945,  an obsession with purity had its hands tight around the throat of medical morality ....